This year we’re celebrating thirty years since Tim Burners-Lee first outlined his vision of a “linked information management system”. In his “vague but exciting” proposal, he laid out how distributed hypertext could be used to make vast quantities of information stored all over the place easier to find and access from any computer.

In 2019, this once abstraction has grown into something very real and tangible that we couldn’t live without: the world wide web. And the ambitious system of distributed hypertext has become the foundation of the search engines we use to navigate and explore it every day.

As per the last thirty years, the way the web works isn’t going to change anytime soon. And so although today you could base your presence solely on social platforms or rely on gaining traffic from email marketing, if you want to exist online, you’re best off figuring out how to rank well in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

We know SEO as the process of increasing the online visibility of a website or web page in the SERPs. We also know it’s somewhat of a science, but mostly an art — with the secret sauce that drives search algorithms being closely guarded by search engine marketers, top ranking domains, Google, and whoever pays for it, naughty naughty.

But for most of us, if you want to get good at SEO, there are many basic SEO best practices you have to follow to stand in with a chance. Things like optimising titles and headings for keywords, gaining links from relevant, authority websites, producing lots of content, and interlinking your pages with rich anchor text.

Many of these practices still hold strong today, and will continue to for many years to come. The thing is, though, although how the web works and how we explore it is not going to change much, there is one major part of the search landscape that is experiencing drastic and rapid change: what matters to the searchers.

Usability,trust,quality, choice — such intangible factors that are somewhat harder to quantify and assess in websites and content, are nonetheless becoming more important and expected by users every day, and so Google and others are beginning to and will only get better at making sure their results can deliver them.

Burners-Lee’s linked information system will continue as the basis for the web we use, but how we use it is evolving way beyond what he could ever have imagined (or ever wanted it to become). And so if you want to be visible on the linked information management system of the 21st century, you need to look at it from a perspective of not only what the machines want, but what the constantly changing and difficult-to-please humans want from it too.

The authentic micro-influencer

Let’s face it, if this article was offered in video format as well as text, it would without a doubt get more views and higher rates of engagement.

What it would also do, as Google understands the value of video content, is boost the article’s ranking in the search results. But the problem is video takes a bit more effort to make sure you get the most out of it. Not only in planning and producing, but in making sure you have the platform and audience for it.

This is where the social media influencer boom comes in. Social stars come with the platform, audience, and face for video, and as such, they were touted by marketers as the “fastest-growing customer-acquisition method over others including organic and paid search.

How it works is simple: an influencer shares a piece of sponsored content to their platform, and voilà, your brand has hitched a ride to page one. The downside, though, as many are finding out the hard way, is that their popularity and value is as fickle as the weather.

People love social media stars because they speak to an audience in an honest and open way about things they care about. But as more and more influencers team up with brands and become marketing powerhouses, the lines between what’s real and what’s sponsored has become somewhat blurred — tainting the authenticity and originality that made the medium so powerful in the first place.

Micro-influencers take the best bits of being an influencer — the relatability, authenticity, and personality — and engage smaller numbers of followers in personal stories. One way to do this is by seeking out the thought leaders and personalities you already have in your company.

It’s the social media intern who likes being in front of the camera, or the accounting manager who already blogs about the business. As long as they’re upfront about their associations and deliver value, people don’t so much care who they work for. Add in tactics like vertical video, and the divide between businesses and customer is so small that effectively building that trust is completely possible without having to rely on hired help.

The information-rich resource

With the rise of video, social media sites, and publishing platforms like Medium, it would seem like running your own blog is a thing of the past. And in many ways, it is.

When most people think of a company blog, they think a sparse scattering of random opinion pieces and the odd too-personal anecdote. But this is the dead shell of blogging that has long been outgrown and discarded, at least by businesses at the leading edge of their niche.

The businesses that use blogging well today build them to be libraries of information-rich resources. Other than e-commerce stores, the majority of websites are largely just holding pages with a few details of product/services and contact info, so their reach tends to be limited to people searching for them or that are sent there directly. Businesses with blogs benefit from the fact that they generate around sixty percent of a site’s search traffic on average.

If your website is the fishing line dangled into the web, a blog is what provides the hooks. In this way, you can use it to place as many hooks as possible across the search landscape. That means going wide and creating content for all stages of the customer journey, focusing on long-form pieces, using multiple languages, routinely updating old content, and following standard SEO best practices.

Sure, there is already a tonne of content out there and more being churned out every day. But if your website is to stand any chance, then it needs to join the fun. Not least because building followings on other platforms, as demonstrated above, is not a clever long-term strategy. Add to that the fact people are only going to crave more original ideas and reliable info, and if your quality is high and consistent, then your blog will get noticed.

The high-quality link distribution network

As long as there’s a web that relies on links as the streets between its addresses and pages, link building will be a part of every SEO strategy.

For a long time, however, link building has been about building up those streets no matter where they lead from and go to. Of course, out of forums and link farms, or government organisations and high authority domains, it’s clear where you want your links to come from. But what’s not so clear is how much traffic to your site those backlinks will actually generate.

Many businesses today rely on social media as a key source of traffic to their blogs and websites. But as posting links on social sites like Facebook drives people away from their platform, which means less ad revenue for them, this is yet again an unreliable long-term strategy.

This is why, in 2019, link building is stronger than ever. However, it’s also why it’s important to think of link building not only as a way to boost your rankings, but also as a key source of referral traffic.

Doing this safeguards you from the pitfalls of social media whilst combining two different ways to drive traffic into one strategy. As Neil Patel describes in his guide to SEO, what this could look like is consistent guest posting and generating PR — methods that create steady, quality traffic and that aren’t too affected by algorithm updates.

The solution for everyone

Listening to choose-your-own-adventure games on Alexa and sharing cringe-worthy lip-synced videos on Tik Tok are trends that may not be around for too much longer. But the trend they’re built upon — the move from text-only to more visual and audible content — most definitely will.

When it comes down to it, SEO is about solving problems in the most appropriate and convenient way. And as anyone who looks up from their phone for a second can see, this is best done today with short video clips and podcasts. What makes them so effective as an SEO strategy, though, is not just preference and convenience, but that they keep people engaged for hours.

Algorithms are built to act favourably toward content types that keep people on the page. So if you have three lines of text answering a question, or you do the same with a five-minute video or a half hour podcast, it’s clear which one is going to boost your rankings.

Or is it? What’s best about video and audio content is that today, it doesn’t necessarily take much less effort to only produce one or the other. Rather, you can take what would in the past have only been a blog post, and you can turn into a video transcript, an audio download, a podcast episode, and an animated video, all for a very little cost and effort.

Such an approach fits the modern mobile web searcher who wants to be able to find content anywhere and choose how they consume it. SEO will always be about giving the user what they want, when they want. Today, users want to listen, watch, and read content, all whilst offline and flicking between each one simultaneously. The best SEO advice for anyone, then, is to be one result that allows them to do it all.

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Joseph Pennington is a freelance writer and long-term traveller from the North of England. Connect with him on LinkedIn and find more articles on work, technology, spirituality, and everything in between.

Even the brightest and best can get it very wrong when it comes to the execution of marketing plans. And we’re not just talking about high-profile, indignation-raising cock-ups that offend members of parliament or outraged special-interest groups.

Day to day, companies often make marketing promises that operations cannot deliver, leaving in it’s wake a bad impression. It’s the disconnect that can create a toxic “them vs us” culture.

It’s purity is impressive. “Simply text us back and we’ll deliver you a crate a beer for St Patrick’s Day. All for a bargain price.”

The plan is simple: send a bulk text to previous purchasers (possibly ignoring GDPR), use a simple “respond to buy” message to create an almost frictionless ordering experience. Set a delivery expectation of a few days (on or before St Patricks Day). Wham-bang, thank-you mam. Back of the net, another priceless win for marketing!

Until you learn that the original offer text was sent 3 days before the St Patrick’s Day weekend, yet the delivery didn’t arrive until the following Thursday, 5 days after St Patrick’s Day,

I can imagine the marketing meeting where the idea came up. It was a great idea – in fact almost genius – but everything else about it went wrong. It probably violated GDPR, on-time delivery was never going to happen, and Operations had no reasonable way of keeping the customer informed without pissing them off.

The customer was me, I got my beer eventually and, probably like most of Beer52’s customers, I wasn’t too bothered as the deal was a good one. But, as a marketer, rewording the offer to remove the brutal deadline would have still worked, as would of a bit more communication during the operational phase.

Will they learn from this? Well, thats an interesting point. I imagine the campaign was a sales success so from a turnover, and maybe stock-turn point of view it worked well. Not so sure about customer relations, though, it must have been stressful.

Introduced in the late 1920s, the first TV set was a heavy square box with a screen not much bigger than an iPad. At last year’s CES, Samsung announced a 4K 146-inch micro-LED TV called The Wall that was nearly as big as, well, a wall.

If TVs continue to get bigger, soon they won’t fit in your house. And anyway, if you wanted to watch something blown up to larger than life proportions, you can still go to that old place called the cinema — if yours is still open.

For a long time, being able to watch anything at all on a screen was a novelty. Soon after, the buzz faded and the new thing was being able to watch something worth watching on a big screen.

Now, you can watch anything, anywhere, at any hour, and on several devices simultaneously. Viewers today don’t care about size; they are barely aware that telecommunications is an innovation and marvel that once never existed; they grew up with tablet in hand. To them, internet access and high-quality streaming is a human right.

As such, the young and modern viewer is less and less impressed by big screens and big-budget productions, and more excited about things like live streaming and short, catchy, lip-synced music videos.

The modern viewer lives on the go, jumping from one experience to the next and never stopping to think why. They don’t want to sit down and just watch a movie or show; they want their viewing to be an interactive experience that is convenient, personal, sharable, and that makes them feel like they’re a key — no, central — part of the action.

This is where vertical video comes in. Vertical video is the original mobile and user-centred medium. The term describes content that’s shot in the 16:9 aspect ratio characteristic of smartphone cameras. So you don’t need a high priced DSLR and a production suite to get into it. Because of this, and some other reason’s we’ll go into, the playing field is much more level compared to other marketing mediums, with the barrier to entry for small businesses being pretty much equal to that of big media houses.

Vertical video may not seem much of a revelation. But what it represents is the dawn of a new age of video consumption, and for that and the reasons below it bears paying close attention to.

Catch the viewer’s undivided attention

At least until AR glasses are cool and subtle enough to actually wear them, the best way to capture someone’s attention is through the device that appears to be constantly glued to their palms.

Unlike desktop, smartphone screens limit the user to viewing one app, panel, or tab at a time. And as video that’s made for a horizontal ratio is a strain unless you turn your phone — which few people are willing to do — that means users love video content that’s made for vertical.

It also means that, even if it’s just for a few moments, you’ve taken over their screen and attention. With vertical video, the user can swipe to the next clip or story, but if your content is good then they the easiest thing is to keep enjoying it. The stats back this up; Snapchat, who pretty much pioneered the approach, found vertical video outperforms horizontal by nine times.

Social media is a mobile platform

Social media was made for mobile. Just try and go to the desktop version of any big social platform and, if there even is one, you’ll quickly see how they’re built around the small vertical screen of a smartphone.

But it’s more than that. Social media is about sharing, connecting, and staying in contact with the world and people while on the move. A good demonstration of this is Stories. After first being launched by Snapchat, the quick and digestible vertical and ephemeral snippets of photos and video is now a feature offered by most the big social sites including Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and YouTube.

The core idea behind Stories is content that’s shot in the moment using your phone — i.e. it’s vertical. Stories therefore have nothing to do with you being a corporate giant with an infinite marketing budget; all that matters is you tell a good story and deliver something that’s relevant, authentic, and relatable.

A truly up close and personal look

As they always appear to have been shot on a smartphone, Stories offer something that other means of advertising and marketing simply can’t. They break down the barrier between brand and customer and reveal what’s behind the suits and glass facades.

You can see this with the rise of the social media influencer. With a little bit of backstory, honesty, and personality (some more than others), they act as a sort of bridge between the cold, disconnectedness of the corporate world and the realness of the person on the street. Done well, they’re able to drive sales unlike any TV or Google ad ever could.

The appeal of many influencers is that they speak to an audience about things they care about, in their own language. Brands often do the former, but fall flat latter. The key, then, isn’t just getting a well-known influencer on board; it’s about the level of transparency you bring to your marketing. By using a smartphone camera to capture content in much the same way your users or customers could, it puts you on their level. Arguably more effectively than influencers, as they often apply various filters that taint and question their legitimacy — not to mention their value is based on how long and well they can ride the wave of popularity.

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Joseph Pennington is a freelance writer and long-term traveller from the North of England. Connect with him on LinkedIn and find more articles on work, technology, spirituality, and everything in between.

There’s tactics and trends that come and go and are good for some businesses but not others. Things like live broadcasting, chatbots, and micro-moments. Then there’s things like SEO, AI, social media, and video marketing.

Omni-channel marketing is on this second list.

It might sound like a buzzword you don’t need to take much notice of, but soon enough it will be the standard practice of any business or brand worth talking about.

Omni-channel marketing is essentially just a fancy name for joining the dots between desktop, mobile, in-store, and any other touchpoints, so that, whatever journey the customer chooses to take, the experience is consistent and seamless.

We’re in the age of the customer. If someone can’t engage with your business using the medium they prefer at whatever time they choose, and receive an experience that’s personal, contextual, and convenient, then they can and will go elsewhere.

Expectations are fast rising along with technological capabilities and competition. Today customers can receive instant responses by speaking to a chatbot on a website. They can access content offline using super fast PWAs. They can ask Alexa or Siri to be updated about an order. And they can do all of that and more from an app on their smartphone.

You can already see that the brands who’re standing out and pulling away are the ones that are unifying their channels and experiences across the board. Let’s dive into two of the main reasons why you should consider doing so too.

Attention trumps all

If anyone knows about the importance of keeping themselves front and centre of the customers’ attention, it’s Amazon.

More than fifteen million people in Britain are Amazon Prime members. Likewise nearly half of the entire population of the US. The next-day delivery and video and music service is Amazon’s key to maintaining its position as an essential part of the customers’ life.

The reason why Amazon is pushing Prime so hard and not, say, focusing solely on selling more Echos, is because it understands the primary good it sells is not groceries or entertainment, but time.

Most people don’t care who’s behind what they consume. Whether it’s Amazon selling them their vegetables or Facebook giving them their news; what matters is that it’s delivered in the most convenient way.

It’s why Prime members spend more than twice as much as non-Prime ones. And it’s also why having an effective omni-channel strategy, that gives your customers the freedom and control to search and buy from wherever they choose, is essential for surviving in an environment of dwindling attention and proliferating devices.

Go personal or go home

While it may appear like omni-channel marketing is all about being everyone at once, spreading your brand thin across every channel possible is the outdated, multi-channel approach. Omni-channel is simply about appearing to your customers like you are everyone at once.

The difference is you are only where you need to be, and you’re there in style. After all, no matter how effective Instagram is said to be, what’s the point in running a huge campaign if your audience are baby boomers? Likewise, why spend all your budget on Google Ads if your audience is gen z who use Instagram or Snapchat as their default home for the web?

Where multi-channel marketing focuses on increasing the number of channels and touchpoints and expanding your reach, omni-channel first thinks about where the customer is. In this way, you can offer a personalised experience and make it so that, whichever device or channel they like to use, it’s like they’re interacting with one consistent brand.

For example, you may sell children’s toys instore and online, but find the two lack consistency. You could use a personalised omni-channel marketing strategy to bridge the gap. Eighty percent of customers use their phones while shopping in brick-and-mortar stores. You may ask how can your mobile experience can complement the in-store experience, and vice versa.

There has been a lot of talk about how AR is going to change the world, but how often have you used or even seen it? Is everything we’re hearing all just hype, or is it that we’re just waiting for the pivotal day when it explodes and suddenly everyone is smiling and talking to themselves and interacting with thin air?

Although it may be hard to believe right now, it’s the latter. And if you need some proof, you can look at how, over recent years, the time it takes between the launch of a new platform and its widespread domination has been getting smaller and smaller.

You can see why people are expecting big things from AR. And the problem up to now isn’t that it’s a one trick pony; it’s that there hasn’t really been a suitable way to explore this new platform. Pokemon Go was great as a novelty and a demonstration of what’s possible, but in terms of everyday use, it gets tiresome having to hold up and look through a tiny window every time you want to see your augmented Squirtle.

Over the past few years, brands have been racing to develop the right hardware for the job. And so despite the current restriction of our tech, the AR world — or mirrorworld, as Kevin Kelly calls it — has been expanding and evolving in parallel to our world of physical things.

It was only a matter of time until we could properly interact with it. And now, in 2019, it seems the race to be the first to release smart AR glasses (that actually work and look good) is coming to an end, and the mirrorworld and our world are at last coming together.

For us, this means we can finally take AR seriously and start considering how it might impact our businesses and fit into our lives. Let’s dive in and find out what that could look like.

Merging the physical with the digital

Today, if you’re a physical business that doesn’t have a good digital presence — i.e. decent social media following and standing in the SERPs — then your chances of competing and gaining new business are slim.

This has caused a huge disconnect to grow between the physical and the digital, with more and more people likely to check TripAdvisor to find somewhere to eat and buy their clothes from the first link on Google than to visit the cafe around the corner or try the department store on their local high street.

But AR is bridging the gap, and even making it so they can co-exist together. AR allows us to create a complete virtual representation of any solid object, lay it directly over the top, and create an altogether new interface that transcends the sum of its parts.

The term for this kind of intervention is SLAM — simultaneous localization and mapping. And it’s possible now. Users will be able to interact with physical objects as if they’re an extension of their devices. Why sit in front of a screen to find out what to eat when you can walk down the street and see reviews and information at a touch of or glance at restaurant signs? Why search through lists and pages of results to learn about the world when you can directly interface with it?

In the same way, though, mixing the digital with the physical will make the online world we know and love even more convenient and accessible than ever. Why play the guessing game of browsing through images of the perfect sofa when you can see exactly where and how it would fit into your living room? Why waste your time ordering and returning items like shoes when you can try a hundred pairs on with a swipe of your hand?

People are being slowly but surely introduced to AR, and now nearly 70 percent of customers expect retailers will use AR in the months ahead. Yet, many companies are still even to look at the technology. This will change in 2019 as competition increases, costs fall, and people catch on to its huge and lucrative potential.

A desk in the clouds

Eighty percent of the global workforce doesn’t have a physical desk. They work while on the move, whether on a farm or factory floor, or while bouncing from service stations and coffee shops.

Add in the forecast that half of the workforce in the UK alone will be working remotely by 2020, and the demand for a virtual desk that can be used whenever and wherever you are is almost too big to measure.

Microsoft is leading the way in this area, and at this year’s Mobile World Congress it announced the latest version of its AR smart glasses, HoloLens 2. Unlike its predecessor, the HoloLens 2 is something you could use on a daily basis. It’s light, comfortable, has a wide field of view, uses eye-tracking technology and more intuitive gestures, and with 2k screens for each eye, can even support such essentials of today as high-quality streaming and video calling.

Currently, the HoloLens is placed at the top end of the market, and so it’s getting the most use in specialist positions in warehouses and workshops, assisting technicians with things like troubleshooting a jet turbine. Google Glass is also trying to make its mark in manufacturing and health care, and Oculus (Facebook), Amazon, and Apple are all working on their own versions of consumer and office friendly AR smart glasses.

It may not happen tomorrow, or the next day, but soon everywhere you look people will be claiming they can see things that aren’t there. They’ll be reaching out and grasping at you. They’ll be living in a world of their own that you’ll be able to meet them in if you buy the glasses and pay for the app.

AR is not just a new platform, it’s a new world. And if you decide that it’s not for you, well, at least to some people, you may as well not even exist.

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Joseph Pennington is a technology and mindfulness writer, as well as the founder of Bebot, the world’s first AI mindfulness coach. You can try out the Bebot Alexa app here and sign up to make sure you hear the latest.

The web is an extremely complex place, and your job, as a business owner, designer, and/or digital marketer, is to make your part of it as simple to use and navigate as humanly possible.

Today, this simplicity can be the difference between gaining a huge following and falling completely off the map. And in quest for it, businesses have tried everything from creating different websites for different devices, using responsive design best practices, and building expensive native applications. But to date, none have really shouted simplicity.

There is another option out there though, that although has had much less attention than the others, has recently gained in popularity: Progressive web apps. Although its name doesn’t suggest it, progressive web apps, or PWAs, offer businesses and users the closest thing to simplicity in a world of various devices, screen sizes, channels, operating systems, APIs, and preferences.

PWAs sit between native apps and mobile sites, taking the advantages of each and doing away with both of their many pitfalls. Launched in 2015, they’re the latest mobile development of the bunch, and the outlook looks so good for them that tonnes of major brands are moving away from native apps to even exclusive use them — on both mobile and desktop.

Not only is this exciting as it could mean the end of web addresses and tabs, it also means we could do away with websites as we know them altogether. It’s a bold idea; so here are a few reasons that support PWAs as a fitting candidate for the future of the web.

Zero friction for everyone

What’s the most important thing about developing for mobile: Usability? Responsiveness? A unique array of features? Well, while many people are stuck answering that question, others are getting right to it and reaching their users and finding out.

In a mobile-first world, PWAs are most effective because they offer a level of speed and convenience that gives users a truly mobile-first experience.

PWAs present your information to a user in an app-like shell that allows app-style interaction, all in the time it takes to click a link. This means little time for consideration and debating over app reviews, no lengthy loading time or sketchy period of installation, and no having to educate or even convince users how to use it. It also does away with permissions, bypassing the growing worry of how companies are going to use or misuse their data.

Service workers are the magic scripts bringing this app-like functionality to the web. They run in the background, supporting features such as push notifications and offline viewing. Unlike apps and traditional web-sites, that means users get a super fast experience no matter of their connectivity and whether they happened to be on mobile or desktop.

A native but light experience

Even if you have a highly responsive website that’s optimised for mobile, chances are it is still going to be somewhat clunky to use on some devices and a big consumer of time and data. And let’s not even get started on apps — so often users don’t have the space to give them a try, never mind the patience.

For users, that can mean an unreliable and frustrating experience with your business. For business owners, it can mean downtime, high bounce rates, and unfavourable positions in the SERPs or ratings in the app store.

As we mentioned above, speed is one of the most important factors in the modern day user’s experience. PWAs speak to this time and attention-scarce society with features that allow, for example, for quick links to be added to the home screen, without the need for space and updates to be constantly running in the background.

In terms of actual user experience, PWAs offer the same level of functionality and UX as you would expect from native apps. That means all-around better navigation and layout, so the user gets what they want with less effort and you get much higher conversion rates.

Premium functionality for less

If you’re one of the companies that missed out on the app boom (and saved some money doing so), now’s your time to cash in.

Dedicated mobile applications are expensive to build, and, unless they’re top of their class, offer very little return on investment. PWAs are a fraction of the cost, won’t get lost in a store of other apps, and, best of all, work on browsers that are common to all devices.

Google and Microsoft are backing PWAs, as well as Apple, albeit more gradually. Companies like Twitter, Instagram, Uber, and Forbes are all using them, including many big retailers who are getting their money’s worth many times over by securing their share of the mobile shopping arena.

One of the reasons PWAs are so cost-effective is because they only rely on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and so finding a developer to whip one up is nothing compared to commissioning a native app. And it’s just as well; users are not willing to wait for speed and usability; they want and can get it now. The companies that wake up and realise that PWAs are the best way to offer this — not only for mobile now, but for the web tomorrow — will be the ones to blaze ahead.

For a long time in TV, there has been something called the ‘Friday night death slot’. It was said that if a show airs at this time, typically between 8 and 11pm, it’s destined for cancellation. Among many others, it was the fate that met Knight Rider, The A-Team, Firefly, and The Flintstones.

It happened because of a few big national or international hit shows that always aired on Friday nights and drew in millions and millions of viewers. It was the power of Prime time.

More recently, though, with more and more people choosing to turn off the TV and turn towards the likes of YouTube, Netflix, gaming, and social media, the term has come to also be used for Friday, Saturday, or even any other evening TV block.

This is particularly sad as Prime time, and being able to acquire exclusive broadcasting rights for big shows, events, and occasions, granted TV the focal point in many homes. But now you can stream the awards show online, hear the inside gossip on Instagram, and do it all before it even reaches TV networks and mainstream media, what good is waiting for it to be shown on a static lump of plastic in the corner of the room?

One thing is for sure: traditional TV, not just prime time, is on it’s way out. How quickly it will go, though, is another question. Let’s take a look at two trends in particular that are digging its grave and playing the leading roles in its demise.

Bye bye set-top tox, hello live streaming

After the switch to digital, to watch live satellite TV you needed a dedicated set-top box. This additional piece of hardware would sit alongside or underneath your tele and do little more than confuse you by adding another remote control and step in between you and your viewing.

Today you can stream live TV over your wireless connection with zero buffer, so set-top boxes and the networks that operate them are either quickly becoming redundant or being forced to evolve into something new. Two of the biggest traditional TV providers in the US, AT&T and Dish Network, got in on the action early and now run the hugely popular live streaming subscription services DirectTV Now and SlingTV, respectively. In the UK, BBC has its Iplayer app and Sky TV has the SkyQ box which even includes Netflix.

Traditional TV hasn’t got it easy if it wants to survive. There are now a whole array of services that allow you to stream live TV on demand — as well as those mentioned above, other leaders include Hulu with Live TV, Roku, Now TV, and PlayStation Vue. As the content lives in the cloud and can be streamed wirelessly, sometimes all you need is an app, but for the most comprehensive range of services, you do need a box or at least a usb stick.

Which service you choose to part the monthly fee with has a lot to do with things like the channels available in your area, how many simultaneous streams you need, and, crucially, the ability to watch recorded content and skip through the ads.

This is a game-changing feature for the new generation of viewers that are growing up with ad-free TV. The cloud DVR feature that most services offer is one way to get around this. However, many services like YouTube TV don’t let you skip through the ads — unless you pay a bit more, that is.

Let’s NOT go to a commercial break

The advertising model made sense when networks were able to attract masses of eyeballs and continue pumping out high-quality content. But now thanks to DVRs and the emergence of on-demand services like Netflix, Hulu, and Prime TV, viewers never have to be interrupted or annoyed by ad breaks ever again.

While this is happening, TV networks are increasing ad prices for prime time slots in attempt to stay afloat. Despite plummeting ratings and the fact advertisers can get much more bang for their buck working with digital and big data giants like Google and Facebook.

The best traditional TV has to offer is its prime time ad slots. These ads potentially reach the eyes of millions of viewers, but who exactly those viewers are and how relevant the ads are to them is a whole other question.

Digital advertising, on the other hand, allows businesses to target ads to people who they know are already interested in what they’re offering. For instance, instead of generic TV viewer profiles like “housewife with two kids”, digital user profiles offer a highly specific and contextual profile, like “housewife with two kids who like to travel and is currently looking for a car”. Factor in that younger viewers who hold the biggest spending power are less and less likely to spend their Saturday’s watching X Factor or The Greatest Dancer, and traditional TV ads are only good if you’re selling life insurance and PPI claims.

Some networks are changing. Fox has announced it’s going to reduce ad time to as little as two minutes an hour by 2020. Others are experimenting with ad-supported storytelling that “seamlessly” integrate businesses and brands into the plotline. Exploring such alternative models like sponsorship and product placement may seem a step backwards, but it’s going to become increasingly necessary if the granddaddies of TV are going to keep attracting new viewers and stay alive.

The spoken word is what separates us from being mere animals. We began developing it nearly a hundred thousand years ago, and in terms of survival, it can be credited as the single biggest reason we’ve lasted so long and been so successful.

As technology has begun to take an increasingly important part in our lives, though, the way in which we communicate has somewhat devolved.

To operate desktop computers, we mash our fingers on keypads, stare at screens, and clamp our hands around mice.

To interact with our phones and mobile devices, we hunch over, thumb the screen, and growl or shout at them in a futile attempt to get them to respond.

Throw in all the other digital interfaces we use on a daily basis, and how we communicate today looks less like highly evolved beings capable of using an extremely efficient and complex system of utterances and sounds, and more like some kind of primitive species of apes that existed a few million years ago.

Thankfully, with advances in AI and specifically natural language processing, the gap between us and technology, and the way in which we interact and communicate with it, is becoming ever smaller.

As a response to living in a mobile-first world, we’re now entering into the age of voice. What this looks like is not bashing and grunting at our devices, but searching the web by speaking to Google, buying products online by chatting with conversational interfaces, and even conversing with them as if they were one of our own.

About time, some of you might say. But not so fast: as the information, stories, apps, games, and everything else that we consume becomes increasingly verbal, there is an unintended consequence it may cause that may see us devolve in a whole other direction.

Much in the same way handwriting is now somewhat obsolete, reading — particularly in-depth reading of printed material — is also becoming a skill, art, and pastime that is slowly but surely fading into history.

Or is it?

It’s hard to say. But the growth of voice is set to be many times greater than mobile apps. And once advertisers start harnessing it, it will not only in the near future be normal to speak and listen to our devices, but voice will be so intrusive that we may soon start wishing we could go back to the romantic world of physical books and silent toasters. The scariest part of it of all, though, is that our minds may not be sharp or even clear enough to remember or care why.

Why books will never die: Reading increases your chances of survival

Reading is one of life’s greatest distractions, avoidance tactics, and general means to kill some time. Of course, reading is so great not only because it offers a way to escape the humdrum of daily existence, but because it requires us to use our brains and learn as we do it. As the following study showed, this engagement actually leads to increasing your time on this Earth so that you can read some more.

Published in the journal Social Science & Medicine, the study looked at over 3,635 people and found that reading provides nearly a two-year survival advantage. One crucial point, though, was that this advantage wasn’t the same for people who read magazines and newspapers as it was for those who read books.

Unlike short-form narratives and attention-grabbing articles, books promote the slow, immersive process the researchers call “deep reading”. Deep reading is a type of cognitive engagement that occurs when a reader is so into a book they start drawing connections across the material, relating it to their lives and the outside world, and posing questions about the content and what it means.

The study didn’t focus specifically on fiction, non-fiction, or a certain genre, and so it seems the benefits of a sharper mind and a longer life — as well as greater vocabulary, social perception, and emotional intelligence — are available to anyone who actually manages to do the increasingly difficult task of picking up and reading a good book.

The ultimate immersive experience

Once upon a time, reading was a fully immersive experience. To read anything worthwhile and get engaged in a story, you had to put everything else on hold, take the time to find somewhere quiet, and do nothing other than read — and maybe sip a cup of tea.

Today, we read from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep. Instant messages, Tweets, blog posts, news stories, advertisements, product descriptions, app instructions, directions; reading is no longer so separated from our lives as an experience in itself, but entangled in it as a means to an end, a mundane activity, a disruption, even a chore.

In this way, good books and stories have been stripped of the ritual and context that make them what they are, and what so crucially allows us to become so deeply engrossed in them so that everything else falls away. The value of this context is clear: you can listen to a book about ancient Norse mythology at the same time as weaving through traffic on your commute, drinking a latte, planning the day’s work, and listening in for the weather forecast. But get asked a question about Thor or Loki by a colleague when you arrive, and the answer is lost on you, like you never even registered it.

Purposely sit down every night for an hour in a quiet room, though, with no phone or distractions or stimuli apart from a paperback book, and you can and will recount everything there is to know about Thor, Loki, Odin, Braggi, Figa, and whoever else to whoever you meet because you were there, alongside them, playing out their adventures and crusades with complete and wholehearted conviction.

]]>Do Chatbots Really Live Up To All The Talk?https://www.connected-uk.com/do-chatbots-really-live-up-to-all-the-talk/
Mon, 04 Feb 2019 11:21:10 +0000https://www.connected-uk.com/?p=7344[more]]]>

Typical of our irrational human minds, we believe robots are going to take over the world before they can even walk. We also think chatbots are going to replace websites, apps, and everything in between before they can even hold a conversation.

That’s not to say it won’t happen. The stats certainly make it look that way: with over a third of users preferring chatbots over apps, and a third of the world’s population — over two and a half billion people — already using messenger apps, chatbots will certainly be a big part of our future. But just how big a part of it they will be is very much up for debate.

Chatbots are essentially computer programs that automate certain tasks through conversational interfaces. They’re very much in their early stages, and, as we’ll see, they face many stumbling blocks which will have a big say in how soon or how long they take to actually become worthwhile investments for businesses.

We’re going to dive into the current chatbot landscape by assessing them across the three major stages of the inbound marketing funnel: connecting, understanding, and delivering.

Connect: Engaging users in a conversation

If there’s one part of the funnel where chatbots really deliver, it’s in getting users engaged. Chatbots have immense potential in allowing businesses to automate one-to-one interactions, not least for small businesses that lack the capacity to hire a team of customer service reps.

What this essentially comes down to is the speed at which chatbots can grab users’ attention and then, hopefully, keep it. It’s marketing 101 that the quicker you can engage your users, the better. The difference with chatbots, though, is that you’re engaging them in a way they associate with personal, one-on-one interactions.

The result is customers feel more attended to, meaning, as conversational interfaces also provide less friction and more seamless information delivery, they’re much less likely to bounce mid-chat and are much more likely to stick around.

At least in theory. Speed is certainly a virtue of the chatbot, but it can quickly be trumped if there is a lack of transparency in the service.

To put it simply, bots don’t work when they pretend to be human. Yes, you’re having a human-like conversation, but that doesn’t mean it should be masked that you’re having it with a bot. Doing so sets up high expectations, which, when the bot fails to interact as naturally as a human would, can come crashing down hard and can cause an irreversible loss of trust.

Understand: Having an actual conversation

With a name like chatbot, you wouldn’t be crazy to think that you could have an actual conversation with one of these things. And you will be able to, eventually. What’s possible today, though, is another matter, and as there are endless examples of failed conversations with chatbots, we’ll just say there’s hope for the future.

But why do chatbots currently suck so much? Well, although some bots with meticulously-written if-then scripts or sophisticated natural language capabilities can mimic human-to-human interaction, it only takes going beyond a few minutes of chatting to begin the see through the charade.

Let’s say you’re talking to a bot about booking a stay in a hotel for you and your parents. Past the dates and the basic facilities, you want to know if the elevators are working well and if the restaurant offers smaller portions. Such context-specific queries are where bots tend to fail most; as they can only carry information for one of two chat bubbles, they have a very hard time deducing the user’s intent and delivering another other than generic, pre-set responses.

The big takeaway for bots here is that they are effective when applied toward fulfilling one task, say, arranging a booking. But they fall down when we think they should be able to do everything. To bring context into a conversation, chatbots need not only advanced AI and natural language technology, but to also be hooked up a business’s larger ecosystem. In this way, they can operate in a more human-like manner, drawing in information from other parts of the business, learning from past interactions, and knowing more and more about who they’re actually having conversations with.

Deliver: Giving the user what they came for

As mentioned above, chatbots are great at achieving simple things — ordering a taxi or getting movie recommendations without leaving your messaging app. And as they’re not humans and nor would we ever want them to be, this is likely where they’ll continue to thrive in the future.

The fact is, when it comes to complex and higher risk interactions, we want to speak with humans. Or, at the very least, when it comes to fulfilling the action, we want to do it with one of our own. A good example is when buying expensive goods online; according to Salesforce, in such cases, only nine percent found a chatbot useful, with thirty percent worrying that the bot will make a mistake.

Saying that, we don’t want to talk to a human when faced with anything that happens to be a little complex. When we have problems with banking, for instance, we generally just want them sorted out as quick as possible — as LV found when its chatbot reduced calls by over ninety percent. Likewise when doing taxes, paying generic bills, and doing anything else that’s less of an experience and more a chore, whether chatbot or human, we don’t care how it’s fulfilled, as long as it is.

Chatbots that know their place and their limitations are warmly welcomed by users and businesses alike. Anyone would much prefer a bot that does one thing really well than many things poorly. Unfortunately, faced with the task of anticipating many potential use cases and inputs, even achieving simple tasks without hiccups is far from where we’re at.

This doesn’t mean chatbots should be avoided at all costs until AI reaches a certain level, but it does mean we need to use our very human creativity and discernability to work out how to get the best out of them and make them better.

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Joseph Pennington is a freelance writer and long-term traveller from the North of England. Connect with him on LinkedIn and find more articles on work, technology, spirituality, and everything in between.

It’s hard to imagine a time when we will talk to our objects and devices and be offended if they don’t reply. But with Google estimating that half of all searches will happen by voice by 2020, and Gartner predicting that thirty percent of all online browsing will take place without a screen by the same year, that time is very much upon us.

And what a time it is. If you haven’t heard, voice user interfaces are wiping out everything that came before them and becoming the new, improved home screen. These home screens are not like we currently know them, but rather invisible, ambient, and made up of a plethora of voice habits and commands that can trigger everything from your car to your cooker.

Sounds convincing. But apart from offering a few novelties, interactive games, and the ability to order more toilet roll before you even stand up, it seems that the potential voice apps and assistants have to offer businesses and their customers today is very limited indeed.

But it would be unwise to discount voice on the basis of its early innovators and adopters. The technology is rapidly evolving and level of penetration is increasing just as fast, with those who have had faith in the industry already reaping the rewards.

So before everyone catches on and the tech really takes off, let’s take a look at a few ways your business can get involved in the voice revolution.

Improve your customers’ daily life

It’s one of the first questions you should ask for any new product: how is it going to improve the customers’ life? But with voice, a paradigm-shifting medium that effectively gives everyone their own digital assistant, things are a little bit different.

First, if voice is going to be the next big interface, it doesn’t matter so much how you apply it in your business, just as long as you do. Second, it’s important to know that no matter how much value you provide, it will be lost if it’s delivered in a way that’s overbearing or intrusive. Voice has the same potential to be as disruptive as it has to be beneficial.

With those points in mind, there’s no end to the ways in which your business can improve its offering and its customers’ lives. And the good news is that often the less demanding and complex the application the more likely customers are to engage with it.

A good example is banking. Capital One’s Alexa Skill enables customers to do things like check their balance, see what bills are due, and even pay them using simple voice commands. What makes it so effective is that, as well as meaning you don’t have to fire up a browser and log in to do a 2-minute task, it’s also ideal in events such as suspected fraud or a lost or stolen card.

To discover how your business can take advantage of voice, ask, what do your customers need to be able to find out or do on a daily, bi-weekly, or weekly basis?’ It could be booking a hair appointment, checking if a parcel has been shipped or delivered, or learning a particular skill or topic. It may be that a voice app improves on an already existing aspect of your service, or that it delivers them with something that’s entirely new.

Address a common pain point

It’s no coincidence that the top Alexa skills include such gems as Chompers, Find My Phone, and Daily Cat Facts. What may seem like trivialities are in fact cleverly designed tools that address common pain points.

Okay, maybe not the last one. But take Chompers, a daily morning and nighttime show full of jokes, riddles, stories, and fun facts that’s based around getting children to brush their teeth for the full two minutes. Gimlet, the media house that hosts it, simply saw a problem of kids not engaging in brushing their teeth, and then converted it into an opportunity and addressed it with hands-free storytelling.

Similarly, Find My Phone addresses a mundane problem we all encounter at some point or other. With the simple command, “Alexa, find my phone”, the app will ring your phone without you even having to stop rummaging around for a second.

Both skills provide effective solutions to pain points, but it’s not as if they are major problems that were impossible to live with before the apps existed. What makes voice so attractive to customers and a leap forward from, say, mobile devices, is that as a hands-free, ambient-technology, it speaks to something we all value: time.

Kayak’s Alexa skill is a great example of how voice apps can save users time. According to a user’s set criteria, the flight and holiday comparison tool searches for deals and alerts users only when it finds something that meets their needs.

It’s essentially like having a personal travel agent; the app works away in the background without you needing to do anything. And so, it removes the need to be constantly manually checking prices online, while at the same time allowing users to be the first in line to hear about new offers.

As well as dealing in time, Kayak’s skill is also dealing in peace of mind. It knows its users are price conscious and extremely busy. So by letting them search for flights, manage their trips, and book hotels using just their voice, they’re providing them with much higher value than any sophisticated, web-based comparison tool ever could.

What are your customers biggest pain points? What takes them longer to do than it needs to? How can you use voice to save them time and improve their peace of mind? Ask these questions diligently and you’ll be sure to come up with one if not several ways your business can take its place in the voice revolution.

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Joseph Pennington is a freelance writer and long-term traveller from the North of England. Connect with him on LinkedIn and find more articles on work, technology, spirituality, and everything in between.